I was raised to believe that going to college was the only right path.
But later, a friend of mine dropped out and started training as a machinist—and somehow, he ended up living much more freely than most of us.
He’s not what you'd call especially “smart,” but he has this intuitive sense for metal, welding, and machines.
Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories—about the machine he fixed, or how he spotted a tiny issue just by the sound it made.
That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk.
Sometimes I wonder if being truly respectable isn’t about how much you earn, but whether you feel proud of what you do.
I've been trying for a long time to understand all the anti-education, anti-science sentiment we've been seeing in the US for so long now. I think a lot of it comes from how much college is emphasized over everything else in k-12 education in the US.
My son is heading to high school next year, and in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career". I tried to listen with the mindset of someone who didn't go to college, and was doing quite fine. It definitely felt like those people were being spoken down to. There were no overt statements against non-college outcomes, but the emphasis was quite clear.
I've watched this play out in my own family. A bunch of extended family members have become quite successful without any college education. When I talk to them today, decades after graduating high school, they still carry so much resentment about how they felt they were treated back then.
anti-education occurs when education is watered down with indoctrination and ideology. Then people equate "education" with what's currently taught. This is dangerous because anti-education becomes anti-learning. Chris Rock had a bit about this.
I think a lot of that sentiment comes from the conservative/religious right, which sees college as a dangerous thing that turns their obedient children into free thinkers and other forms of deviancy.
Another aspect of this is simply pandering by reframing the class war into "intellectual elites" vs the owner class.
College isn't for everyone, but it should be accessible to all that want it.
> In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were in part consequences of the democratization of knowledge. Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, resulting from its colonial and evangelical Protestant heritage. He contended that evangelical American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigor.[5]
> Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as "resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life."[6] He further described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."[7]
> in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career".
1. If the school pulled from a certain kind of socio-economic status population, then this is a reasonable broad statement to make.
2. In other cases, it may just be projection and/or lazy thinking.
3. The US fascination with college eduction, attributing it to higher earnings, conflates correlation with causation. Many of the folks who go to college will also have a financially bright future if they don’t go to college — for example, by monetizing their social network.
4. The case for defaulting to a college education is that many places use it as a filter for job applicants.
5. My recommendation to folks is either go to a school with a well-developed alumni and/or job placement network or go to the cheapest and easiest school that they have access to. Learning isn’t really part of the equation, since it will either be baked into the program they enter, or they can just embrace autonomous/independent learning. The quality of education at middling institutions is just not very good.
6. Note that I believe that the US is producing college graduates at about double the rate that we need. A quick search of data shows that ~40% of folks aged 25-29 in 2022 had a college degree. I think that number should probably be closer to 15-20%… maybe as low as 10%. The only way the waste in the system can be cut is probably from above — using a college degree as a job filter misaligns incentives, imho, and this won’t change easily.
>> Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to ...
Well, everyone has this energy at 18. Can you do this "sweating through long manual labor shifts" for 10, 20, 30 years?
If you get hurt or just your body gives up (back pain, neck pain, arthritis or what else), you're in a much worse position as a "trade worker" than an office worker.
Not mentioning how much they'd love to replace you with machines, immigrants or younger workers. This is true in an office setting also but bureaucracy somehow finds a way to survive.
I don't know. To add a bit of anecdata, I've married into a carpentry family. They are all older and much healthier than me who "is just sitting at the computer whole day". Also goes to my IT friends from university and high school who all developed serious back and other health issues from sitting the whole day doing office work. So I would say it depends.
I'm frome trade family and I've seen the opposite. The ones who actually stay in the trade and don't step onto management of some sort are broken down in old age. It looks fine at 40, but by 50 you see the impact and by 60 the difference is alarming. Of course you maintain physical fitness by virtue of what they do, but the amount of injuries they acclimate is also worth considering, especially since an office worker can just get a better chair and run on occasion to mitigate risk. Not so for trade jobs. You normally must stop doing the trade and manage those who do it to maintain your health.
Totally agree, our culture definitely focuses way too much on idolising wonderkids, which often isn't realistic and is far from the truth of how success usually happens. You see it so clearly in sports, it's often not the most naturally gifted kid who ends up achieving the most, but the one who trains harder and just refuses to give up. I wish I knew the secret to bottling this life lesson up for my own kids but it seems this only comes naturally with time.
Yes, sorry I wrote short. The praise was about when the child achieves something you yse language like "you worked hard to succeed there" rather than "you're so talented to succeed there"
We have a real problem in the way we think about intelligence. There are so many dimensions to intelligence that having a single scalar value is very counterproductive.
Your friend seems to have a certain type of intelligence, while you and your other friends have a different type of intelligence.
Part of the current political situation is in part due to the traditionally intelligent people looking down on the rest of society.
For a functioning society we need all types of intelligence, and we need to value them all. Equally.
If you are interested, you can do both. I work for a company that produces machines that tend to get integrated in automation cells for aerospace/automotive parts manufacturers. As the field technician, it's my job to know how our machines play with everything else in that cell so I can fix issues for our customers when things break (and they will break, eventually, for a wide variety of reasons which creates a weird fragility to the whole automation system, but that's a different post).
This requires that I know what's going on mechanically _and_ at what expected behavior of the embedded systems should be (PLCs, device firmware/software packages, network security, etc).
Like you, I was pushed to go to college after high school, only to find out later that college is an industry, not an institution, so the rhetoric about not being able to get a good job without a degree was really just a sales pitch to get my lower-class parents to take out loans they could not afford so me, a veritable child at the time, could make a major decision that would set the tone for the rest of my life. It's a lot of systemically flawed Capitalistic nonsense.
In my field, we _desperately_ need people who understand (at the very least) basic electronics and mechanics, but also the software side of things. The amount of techs from other companies, companies with a much larger and more public reputation than my employers mind you, that do not seem to have a grasp on the basics is astounding and alarming. But even the competent electromechanical techs are weak on how the software or firmware functions, which is often a big key to the "wtf is wrong" puzzle.
I'm not even a coder/programmer, but I know enough to get by and make effort to learn something about programming embedded systems or software for Controls every day, and while I am still an amateur, my god, it gives me quite the edge over a lot of the other guys.
You don't have to be trapped at a desk. Mechanical aptitude can be developed, but it starts by not being afraid to take the screws out and seeing what you can just figure out. The pride you mention comes from that, but you also touched on something else; tangible results. Believe me, I have respect for devs who can create a piece of software from start to finish, but when I manage to bring a slag-crusted horrifyingly-neglected machine back to live after a catastrophic failure that had Automaker X sweating $10000 bullets, it is a real thrill, one that infuses me with great energy for days, sometimes weeks. That's why your friend likes sharing those stories!
> Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories
That's because he's only sweating through those long shifts, and not thinking through them. I bet I would have more energy to clean the house after work than he would.
> I have no interest in working for $60k for the rest of my life.
I’m not sure where you live, but folks in the trades in CA move beyond $60k fairly quickly.
I realize that is partially because of CA, where full time fast food folks make $40k a year minimum, but many of the folks in trades that I know have really nice houses and cars.
Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries? Pick the right tool for the job. If you’re wrong, or don’t know how to use your tools / understand the metals, you in for some trouble.
Most programmers think too highly of themselves.
Software projects have the exact same problems as construction jobs, with the main difference liability.
> Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries
I'm not sure this is a serious question, but the two have nothing at all in common. Anyone who says otherwise either has never welded or never used a computer.
Those "software vs physical stuff" discussions remind me of modern vs old-school music production. Not the final product (the music) but the production process in itself.
One goes "commit to nothing, you can always change it later, hundreds of convenient tools at hand, move super quick but you don't 'finish' it, you just 'abandon' it".
The other is "commit early, make the best you can since changing anything is expensive, not too many tools, slap the roof and proclaim it good enough, ship it".
The difference is mostly due to destructive vs non-destructive workflows.
I'm not really saying one is better than the other, or even that the difficulty is different... but process-wise those things are miles apart.
I mostly agree but dimensionality is also a huge one. Being constrained to 3 dimensions and standard building materials really limits the problem space. It's why you can probably figure out how to build a structure where all the entrances lock but you definitely shouldn't roll your own crypto.
I find that physical work is different but not simpler than programming. Yes there are only 3 dimensions, but there are lots of layers of important "details" that you can't ignore, whereas digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot.
> digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot
I'm not clear what you mean by that. Most of the library code I deal with is far from ideal (IMO). Even most of the things I implement aren't ideal because either I'm interacting with the real world or even if not I don't want to spend unlimited time fully generalizing it.
As a concrete example, absolutely nothing that touches floating point arithmetic is "ideal" in any sense of the word.
Scheduling, staffing, and tooling constraints all exist in the software world as well. If you're going to extend to the entire job site then you'll need to extend to the entire dev team plus associated management.
I don't immediately see an analogy to supply chain issues but then I hadn't intended this as a pissing contest to begin with.
It's interesting to me that I'm getting defensive replies when all I pointed out was the increased dimensionality of the problem space when writing code versus assembling a physical product. I don't think that observation can realistically be contested.
Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories—about the machine he fixed, or how he spotted a tiny issue just by the sound it made.
That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk.
Sometimes I wonder if being truly respectable isn’t about how much you earn, but whether you feel proud of what you do.